The Pythagorean catastrophe

Today's SMBC:

For those not learned in unix lore,

sudo rm -rf /

means "wipe the file system clean — remove everything".

This is the catastrophe that Pythagoras was worried about — see Thomas McEvilley, "The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies" (quoted in "Pavarotti and the crack to chaos", 9/7/2007), where you can also learn about the Pythagorean comma, evidence of how God screwed up the diatonic scale):

It requires a leap of horizon to understand the intensity with which such things mattered to ancient thinkers. … The issue which made [the Pythagorean comma] so pressingly important was nothing less than the question .. whether reality is mathematical or not.

When Pythagoras discovered (or learned) the so-called Pythagorean Theorem, … it is said that he hastened to sacrifice oxen. he felt that he had touched on a power center in the mathematical fabric of the universe. …

The Pythagorean Theorem is the threshold to the discovery of irrational numbers and incommensurable lengths — a discovery which Hellenists attribute to Hippasus of Tarentum, a renegade Pythagorean whom, according to one account, Pythagoras pushed off a boat for revealing to outsiders the tragic secret of the Pythagorean Theorem, which was irrationality or incommensurability. … The discovery that the side and diagonal of a square will always be incommensurable produced an ideological convulsion in the Pythagorean order comparable to the shock conveyed by the discovery of the Precession or the Pythagorean comma. … Like the Precessional drift and the Pythagorean comma, this apparent crack or gap in the mathematical fabric of the universe seemed ominous, as if such cracks lead through the membrane of order to chaos. They deny that the universe is orderly and hence that it is cognizable, and thereby remove credibility from all human thought. The Precession threatens the calendar and all the depends on it, and through the Pythagorean comma, as through a crack to chaos, the plethora of untuned sounds that could disrupt the harmony of the universe flows in.

The mouseover title: "This sort of thing happens about once a week."

The aftercomic: